ART MARKET ANALYSIS 2015

NEW YORK

The Contemporary Art Day Auction at Sotheby’s totaled $98,025,250 with 80% of lots sold. The sale was led by Roy Lichtenstein’s “Modern Painting with Yellow Interweave” from 1967 which sold for $3.4 million, and “Heat” by Kenneth Noland, which set a new record for the artist at auction selling for $3.3 million. A Cy Twombly blackboard painting, “Untitled (New York City)”, was the top lot in the Contemporary Art Evening Auction selling for $70.5 million, and is also the most expensive work sold at Sotheby’s worldwide in 2015.

Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale on November 6th, 2015 featured a broad array of pictures, works on paper and sculpture by the leading artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Highlights included an oil portrait of a bather by Paul Cézanne which was once owned by Paul Signac, a 1906 Fauve picture by Raoul Dufy from a distinguished Asian collection, a monumental port scene by André Lhote from a private collection in Scandinavia, and an extremely rare and widely published oil by Heinrich Campendonk from the collection of Jules and Gladys Reiner.

Alfred Taubman’s estate auction launched unsuccessfully last night. The eclectic collection once belonged to the magnate who resigned from his chairman’s role in 2000 amid a price-fixing scandal between Christie’s and Sotheby’s. . This precedent affected significantly the perceived value of the auctioned artworks, despite the fact that twelve pages of the catalogue tried to “clean” the moral character of the collectionist.

The Contemporary Art Day Auction at Sotheby’s totaled $98,025,250 with 80% of lots sold. The sale was led by Roy Lichtenstein’s “Modern Painting with Yellow Interweave” from 1967 which sold for $3.4 million, and “Heat” by Kenneth Noland, which set a new record for the artist at auction selling for $3.3 million. A Cy Twombly blackboard painting, “Untitled (New York City)”, was the top lot in the Contemporary Art Evening Auction selling for $70.5 million, and is also the most expensive work sold at Sotheby’s worldwide in 2015.

The total amount sold was $669,087,875 USD; 9.5% above last May’s auctions and 0.5% below last November’s sales. Despite being less than half of the Post-War and Contemporary Sales, the total achieved remained in the markets’ total average from the last couple of years. From this total, Sotheby’s sold 63% and Christie’s 37%. In general, the unsold rate of 23% was in line with the market’s average, in total 769 artworks were offered for sale and 590 found buyers.

LONDON

The total amount sold in Post-War and Contemporary Auctions including the Italian Art sales was $336,378,719 USD, corresponding 41.4% to Christie’s, 41.3% Sotheby’s and 17.2% to Phillips. The auctions were held parallel to Art Frieze and Frieze Masters in London in mid October. The noteworthy results correspond to the Italian art sales held in both mayor auction houses, the total sold surpassed the total from the evening sales and many price records were established. These two sales added $129,313,364; a 17% increase from last October’s Italian Sale, indicating a growing demand for this specific art market.